


Circumstance and Chance

by thisnewjoe



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: (violence is mostly off-stage), Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Canon-Typical Violence, Erica is a gossip, Gen, Implied/Referenced Torture, Jordan Parrish is a romantic goof, M/M, Soul Bond, Soulmates, Spark Stiles Stilinski
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-14
Updated: 2019-02-14
Packaged: 2019-10-28 03:31:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 6,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17779763
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thisnewjoe/pseuds/thisnewjoe
Summary: Even the supernatural beings in Beacon Hills don't know much about soulmate bonds, but when it happens to you, it's exactly as awesome and incredible as everyone says it is. Stiles and Derek discover their bond, and along they way they inspire hope in people around them.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ssleif](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ssleif/gifts).



"So, recruit, tell me more about yourself. How did you and Boyd figure out you were the ones for each other?"

"Well, Deputy," she said, with half-hearted derision, "he was one of the people who helped clear the area around me when I had a seizure in the hall in high school." Erica's glance out the window at that moment seemed less about checking out the streets they passed than about dipping into memories of things he was learning she didn't want to talk much about. "I was still weak when he turned down the hall and noticed me, not able to sit-up on my own. I asked him for help and at the first touch of his big, capable hands, I was hooked! We had our little memories exchange thing and our fates were sealed."

As she finished the line she glanced at the man's hands, and pointedly looked at his bare fingers. "Haven't found yours yet?"

Parrish sighed. "Somewhere, out there, someone is as eager as I am to make contact, and find out we're the right ones for each other." 

Erica had only just joined the Beacon County Sheriff's department and this was her first patrol with Parrish. The man had a reputation for being adorable, street-smart, and single. She'd already heard rumors of a betting pool for how long it would take the veteran deputy to find his true love, and she was debating how much she wanted to put into the pool.

"You know, Parrish, you've got quite the reputation around the station. Pretty much everyone calls you 'Deputy Hotpants' when you're out of earshot."

"Yeah, actually, I've heard that myself." While most mundane people never knew anything about the supernatural, the Beacon Hills Sheriff's department had a few werewolf deputies on staff. He waited to see if Erica picked-up on it.

"Well, I know you're something, but you're not a werewolf. What are you?"

"We haven't figured that out yet. The Sheriff knows—" Jordan catches her shrugging her shoulders, as though she suspected it, but hadn't confirmed it until just then. "Well, I wish I knew. It might make things easier."

"I don't think you have anything to worry about, man. Keep yourself available, look around, talk to people. Do things the old fashioned way and have a good time until the magic moment happens."

That was exactly what Jordan had been doing for years. He'd met people who discovered they were soulmates all the way back in elementary school, though it was pretty rare. It was much more common as people went through middle and high school, and maybe half of people who went to college found their person at college or as a consequence of being there.

The math of soulmates didn't make sense, so Jordan assumed it was just something supernatural that the mundane people assumed was the sort of fantastical magic they read about in fairy tales, not realizing how much real life sparked the ideas behind the original forms of those tales long ago.

"I hope it doesn't take too much longer. I'd really like to take someone out on a nice date and know that it'll be okay."

Erica snickered. "Deputy Parrish is desperately seeking 'sweetheart'." She laughed, then added, "Just try not to fall in love with anyone we might encounter on the job. I doubt you're looking to have that date in the county lockup!"

Parrish was discovering that this new brazen recruit was already starting to feel a lot like a friend, and that would help them both in the coming months as he taught her the ins and outs of the life of Deputies in Beacon Hills.


	2. Chapter 2

"Okay, Scott. while we're on this call, you gotta stay back from the situation. You really can't help with the human stuff," Stiles stopped his friend's protests with a raised hand, "only because our liability coverage doesn't extend to anything you might do at a triage scene."

"What if you need another set of hands?"

Danny reported that he and Stiles are reporting to the scene the county dispatch had just assigned them to, then he added, "You're real nice, Scott, and I'm sure you're great at what you do, but this one has to be just us."

"And if we do need more hands," Stiles considered, "it would probably fall under Good Samaritan laws, but dispatch said the call was about a kidnapping victim the deputies found, so I really hope we don't need any more hands than what Danny and I are bringing."

Scott sat back in his jump seat, belted into the chair that was immediately behind Stiles and angled 90 degrees from forward so he can see forward and back into the rear compartment with a simple turn of his head. For a person on a ride-along, it was a prime seat for being out of the way, but close to the action.

Danny and Stiles got assigned together in the paramedic crew during training, when the instructors noticed how effective they were in practice exercises together. Danny was great at handling all the technical details of each situation, understanding which equipment was needed, and making it available for Stiles. As his partner, Stiles' strengths were in his calculating mind, and ability to rapidly assess a situation and triage a patient more rapidly than most of the crew. This left them with a very high positive feedback rate from people who were in their care, and lead to a couple nice bonuses to them in the last few years.

Scott had gone into veterinary practice as an assistant to the biggest veterinary clinic in town, learning everything he could from Dr. Deaton before going to vet school in Oregon and returning to Beacon Hills to join the staff at Deaton's clinic. He had an interest in helping and healing however he could, being one of the several werewolves around in Beacon County who could use their powers to help reduce pain and encourage healing in any living creature, though Scott's general lack of tact and situational awareness meant that clinical veterinary care also tended to reduce the likelihood that anyone would realize he was using wolfy powers to help people.

The call the trio are headed to this time is for a man in his late 20s, a few years older than Stiles, Scott, and Danny were, and Danny and Stiles were discussing likely scenarios and hazards as they got updates over the radio from the dispatch crew.

"Scotty, it sounds like we might have a werewolf here. Trapped by hunters, unfortunately."

"Danny knows about werewolves?"

"Yeah, I confirmed things for him in a couple years ago after there was an incident with a wendigo, but it turns out," he turns to Danny and gives him an appreciative look, "he already suspected something else was going on. He'd heard things in high school that didn't seem normal, but I showed him how my spark works and now we spend time going through the bestiary when we've got down time."

"That sounds pretty cool!"

Danny keeps his eyes on the road and compliments Stiles on his excellent grasp of all things supernatural, and his astonishing ability to recall things in great detail, but adds a comment that Stiles does still have ADD and gets distracted at times. So Danny keeps his ear out for calls while Stiles talks and lets him know when they've got to go.

"Having Danny around is like having the favorite pupil I've never known I wanted, but I get to have all to myself!"

Danny laughs. "I'm not yours, buddy. You'll find yours some day."

Scott's face lights-up just as Stiles' chuckles lose their humor. "Oh, and when you find them, you better let me know right away, bro!"

"You got it, Scotty!" Stiles paid half-attention as Scott told Danny the tale of how he and Allison had met and discovered that they were soulmates. The complications of a hunter daughter dating a werewolf took some time to figure out, but the family came around and Scott proved himself to be a real good guy to them, so they got over it.


	3. Chapter 3

Stiles realized immediately this was a very abnormal hostage situation, and not just because of the werewolf in the hunter's trap. Between the torture rigging they'd made to cause an extreme amount of pain, he suspected there was a bigger link between this particular wolf and this crumbling husk of a home that must have been beautiful before a fire had torn through it years ago. It's been out here in the Preserve at the end of a road most people passed without noticing it was there. Stiles felt magic around here, and suspected there may be the remnants of an obscuring spell, designed to keep people from noticing the property unless they were supposed to find their way here.

Though the magic had diminished somewhat, and the road wasn't entirely unnoticeable anymore. Danny's latent ability to amplify Stile's spark sense lead them to catching the driveway on their first approach, and no time was lost in backtracking. 

Which also served to remind Stiles to find out more about Danny's past, since he'd only recently discovered that his magic just seemed to work better when Danny was around. If they hadn't already touched many times in the course of their regular work, and on the lacrosse team in high school, Stiles might have suspected he was Stile's soulmate, and would have tested him for it. But that wasn't the case, and so he played the long game in studying his friend and learning what he could about how his magic worked differently around the other man.

At the scene, one deputy who had remained at the car dashed into the woods in apparent pursuit of whoever had done this. With the paramedics on the scene, she was free to help her partner find and capture the person responsible for bringing them all out here this evening.

Stiles grabbed his supplies box and ran to the man before Danny had finished coming to a stop. By the time the other men got to Stiles and the victim, they could tell Stiles was struggling with how to help the guy.

"Sir, I'm a paramedic and I'm here to help. I need you to relax so you don't hurt us."

The growl he received in response confirmed what he had guessed when attempting to assess the situation and the man's injuries: This is a werewolf. He's in the half-shifted appearance of a werewolf, and mad from what must have been an intensive amount of physical torture, on top of whatever the woman had done to his mind.

"Sir, you're half-shifted and I need to get you out of there. If you keep moving, you will make it worse." He glanced around at the structure. It was designed to inflict more pain as the wolf fought, providing immediate punishment if he attempted to resist. It worked against the paramedic's efforts, since the wolf was understandably hostile to smelling new people while he was in such a vulnerable state.

When Danny and Scott approached, the man growled, his eyes growing a vibrant red through the filthy cloth that held his head flush to the metal structure, and looked to be slowly burning the man.

"ALPHA!" Scott yelled, and Stiles sizzled a restrained swear in his direction.

"Get back to the ambulance, Scott. Stay upwind."

"I'm not gonna hurt him!" Scott protested.

"You're a threat! He is more animal than human right now, running on instinct. You are an unknown wolf and you can't be here." Stiles nodded when he saw that Scott understood the meaning now that it had been put in a veterinary context for him. He'd then glanced at Danny, who nodded and tugged Scott away from the scene, so both of them could stand by the ambulance. Danny would return when Stiles gave him the okay.

Right now, the man and the wolf inside needed one thing to focus on, and Stiles had to get them both to trust him before he could get them out.


	4. Chapter 4

It would have been impossible for the man to see through the pain even if he hadn't been blindfolded with a mask laced with wolfsbane. It covered his eyes and burned his skin where it touched, leaving a vertical band of pain from his eyebrows to his cheeks, and which wrapped fully around his skull to the point where his head was secured against a cold metal frame. 

Inside himself, in darkness behind the immediate pain, the wolf stood. It looked harried, head low to the imaginary ground and hackles raised as high as Derek had ever observed them. They were furious at having been captured and desperate for a chance to walk away and heal. The respite of the last few minutes couldn't be trusted. The hunter couldn't be trusted not to be using the momentary break as a component in her torture plans. She'd been toying with Derek for days, stalking him and then trapping him and then bringing him back to his family home. When he'd woken here, she'd told him how she'd found them, hunted his whole family, and made sure they were all together before she triggered the trap that left everyone he'd loved dead.

Derek sensed the man approaching just as he spoke, and it infuriated him that they couldn't just kill him already, and put him out of his misery.

He gave the most bone-shaking growl he could manage in his current state, and was halfway impressed that he managed to pull it off enough that the man stopped coming closer. He could hear the man, and because he couldn't see him, he was trying to keep his location known by listening for the man's heartbeat. The sizzle of the mask made it difficult, as did the weakness he felt all over, but he did find it, and the man sounded nervous.

He shared a wicked smile with his wolf, who looked back at him with its own toothy grin.

The man was talking again. Derek wanted to growl, but the man wasn't shouting insults, or doing anything, really. He was just talking. Derek strained to listen.

"Yes, please, keep relaxing. I'm a paramedic and my buddy and I are here to get you out of this."

Derek and his wolf both grumbled. He knew his family's land was still protected somewhat by magic that should keep everyone away who wasn't invited there. This means hikers, wanderers, and even hunters, for the most part. It would have kept his torturer out of here years ago had he realized at the time who she really was, and had he not invited her to visit him. As soon as he'd done that, the family's dark fate was certain, and Derek accepted that it was his fault.

Derek's train of thought was interrupted again by the new voice.

"Look, I'm going to get close enough for you to scent me, alright? I want you to be able to recognize me so you don't go biting me in a fit of rage at that woman the deputies are chasing in the woods. Can I approach you now, sir?"

The voice was confident, but his true confidence was evident in how his rapid heartbeat sounded thunderous. The man, perhaps he was a paramedic, who was genuinely trying to help.

"I'm human, so I'm immune to most of the things in this trap, but it's still dangerous for you and me. I really need you to be still, so I'm going to let you scent me, then I'm going to start getting you out of there." The man seemed to look for a reaction from Derek. The wolf inside was wary, and tired, and Derek hoped that giving this shred of trust now wouldn't lead to the worse torture of it all being a ruse.

"Okay, I'm stepping closer, I'm about ten feet away." Derek could hear the man approaching, stepping cautiously, but oddly, less fearfully as he approached. Perhaps he took it as a good sign that Derek wasn't reacting badly as he approached. "I'm assuming you can hear me, but you're not saying anything, so if you can speak, I'd really appreciate it if you could say your name, just to let me know how close to the surface the man is, versus your wolf."

Whoever this was had just insulted his wolf, and Derek didn't like it any more than the wolf did. But he kept his growl under control because he could tell this person was just trying to do his job, and he didn't know better.

The wolf looked at Derek in his mind, and gave him the impression that the wolf wasn't satisfied with either of them right now, but it pulled a little out of the defensive posture, apparently agreeing with Derek's assessment.

If the wolf and Derek disagreed about how to respond, whichever was stronger in that moment would take control. Derek had already yielded to the wolf during the torture, each of them taking the brunt of the damage and causing him to shift variously between his human and his beta forms. He couldn't full shift like this, not with the restraints, so he was still stuck in the hunter's trap.

"Sir, I'm six feet away now. Can you tell me your name?"

Derek grumbled. He couldn't get his mouth to work right, and the syllables just sounded like a weak growl.

"I don't know how well you can hear me, but I really hope you can listen to my heartbeat and tell that I'm just trying to help, for real, cross my heart and hope to save your life, and all that good stuff. Do you understand?" The man's voice rose with evident uncertainty.

One thing Derek was certain of is that this person was no hunter, and his heartbeat gave no telltale stutter that might give away his deception.

"I'm sorry I have to get so close to do this, since you're upwind, of me, but I am trying to work on a short timeline here. I'm stepping to arm's reach of you in just a moment, so please don't worry that I'm so close." For all the absurd chattering, the man's voice did seem to instill further confidence in Derek and his wolf that they were in capable hands, at least for getting out of here.

And then he smelled the whiff of a spark. He felt his eyes bleed red light, and he couldn't stop himself from growling, "No magic!"

"I can't! I'm sorry! I'm a spark! I'm not trying to use magic, it's just who I am. If I smell bad right now, please just let it go. You're in really bad shape and if I could have taken a shower before this, I might have, but that's actually a pretty silly thing to do and I just want to help, okay? Please? Can you just like, sniff again and make sure you feel confident that I'm here and all that good stuff?"

Derek inhaled and both he and the wolf froze. The scent was clear now, feeling clearer perhaps than anything had before. If the motion of a summer breeze could be captured in warm cookies, and baked perfectly on a lazy Saturday afternoon when a thunderstorm was rolling through, that is what this man smelled like to Derek. Warm and lightning and fire. He had sighed and sucked a fresh breath in again before he or the wolf realized what they were doing. Both startled internally when they heard a voice in the distance.

"What the hell is he doing, Stiles?" a different voice asked, from farther away. Derek vaguely recalled someone yelling at another werewolf. They weren't near, and Derek let himself relish in the scent of this man.

"I don't know, but it's kind of like he's taken a dose of werewolf catnip or something, Scotty. I know I don't smell like that to you, so I really have no idea what's happening. PleaseShutUp!" The Stiles said these last words in a rush of syllables, revealing the astonishment of whatever he was happening between Derek and himself. Derek listened as the man cursed under his breath at his friend's overprotective nature.

"I shouldn't have brought him out here on a day where we get to rescue a severely injured werewolf. No, sir-ee, I should not have done that."

"Hagrid?" was Derek's mumbled automatic reply, created during hours of rereading the whole series over the years.

"Did you just ask me if I'm Hagrid?"

Derek grunted. Words were hard right now, and the question was stupid. He felt foolish for asking, but he didn't feel in control right now and it annoyed him. Based on the sensation of the wolf pacing around in his head, the wolf didn't feel all that in control, but at least it was pacing in an even circle, sniffing the air for more clues about this new person.

"Okay, so I am guessing you are okay with me being close, so I'm going to walk you through what I'll be doing step-by-step so you know exactly what I'm going to do, and I'm going to do everything I can to keep this as painless as possible for you, okay, dude?"

Derek grumbled at that.

"Sorry, I didn't catch that. If you want my attention, you'll have to speak louder."

Derek felt that the sarcasm wasn't really appropriate in this situation, but since the man also smelled like the best cookies ever, Derek decided not to try to speak again and possibly say something else foolish. The guy was talkative enough for the two of them, and Derek was reticent to speak much at all to begin with, even when he was in good health.


	5. Chapter 5

Stiles drums the fingers of one hand over his knee as he sits on the hard plastic chair. The hospital was quiet and the hours were not kind to his beleaguered attention span. His energy level has oscillated between "whatever" and "ohmygodihavetomove" for a couple hours, which was preceded by his unwilling participation in some pretty major surgery that had kept the mundane doctors working on Derek through the morning hours. If the werewolf's healing powers were working, it wouldn't have been necessary, but something had been stopping them, and Stiles let the hospital staff do their thing while he tried to stay out of the way.

In the bed next to him was the man he'd rescued the night before: Derek S. Hale. A twenty-something man whose family had died in the fire that also taken most of the house with it more than a decade ago. Stiles has vague memories of hearing about the fire as a kid, and didn't know anyone had survived it until the identity of the man was confirmed with the ID found near him.

Stiles regarded the man laying still in the bed, and let his eyes trace the man's form. He was muscular, and not just because of the werewolf powers, since there were plenty of lean wolves around. The nature of wolves in the wilds was not bulky mass, either, though the thick fur might seem to suggest muscular curves that just weren't there. Derek's hair was black, and had a slight blue hue in the sunlight that filtered through cracks in the blinds. The paramedic had been enjoying the way the sun glittered through the other man's hair, and found himself wearing a smile that he didn't recall making happen.

Then again, lots about this situation happened without him understanding it. The prime example was Derek's unyielding grip on the wrist of Stiles' left arm. This had happened as soon as Stiles had released the first restraints around the wolfman's right arm, trying to let the wounded man feel some self-determination about what needed to be removed next.

Instead, as soon as Stiles had brushed against him as he reached around the metal frame, Derek's hand had clamped down securely and the wolf had passed-out. In that same moment, Stiles felt a flush of spark energy throughout his body, rushing to his arm, and for several hours it had been tingling with a new energy that he assumed meant his magic was helping the werewolf heal.

It was hard to tell with the supernatural. No history book or grimoire or bestiary is comprehensive enough to cover every situation they'll run into. Danny's helping Stiles build a better electronic system for looking these things up, and keeping it updated, but the specific case here just hadn't come up before.

Scott had suggested it might be a bonding of soulmates. Stiles didn't think so, since he'd never heard of any soulmate bond resulting in the complete collapse of their partner except for the clamping of one person to another. It just doesn't work this way. Stiles had called Deaton, the veterinarian by day and on-call druid, but Deaton had simply promised to look into it and get back to him this evening with anything he might find.

Stiles was not expecting him to find much of anything, and he tried not to check his phone too often for messages from the magic man.

One thing Stiles almost liked about the situation was that he did kind of feel like Derek had sniffed-up his wolfy catnip scents and somehow maybe that magically caused him to pass out. And the guy was a hunk, no doubt. He was unconscious, and the drip of pain reliever seemed to keep most of the physical agony of healing from interrupting whatever state the wolf himself had gotten into. It seemed like a coma to Stiles, but everyone else disagreed. Who is he to disagree with hundreds of years of mundane science? It's not like they don't know they have more to discover, though they seem to keep missing the magical creatures that pass through there, including this particular alpha wolf that had kind of taken Stiles prisoner.

Which, again, Stiles wanted to understand, but he didn't feel was really a threat. If he wanted to, he had the ability to break the wolf's fingers with magic, but he just felt that he should be patient. It was a skill he hated practicing, since patience seemed to be what you to do fill the time between the stuff you actually want to do, but Stiles toughed it out anyway, browsing the net one-handed while waiting for Derek to wake.

All-in-all, the situation wasn't too bad. The wolf's grip on Stiles' wrist did not yield, even when the staff tried to pry his fingers apart, but the grip didn't cause any loss of bloodflow or pinched nerves, Stiles declined to let them keep trying to free him and agreed to just sit with Derek in the hospital.

And truth be told, he worried that a hunter might come in while Derek was unconscious and try to finish the job. Even with one hand tied to this werewolf, Stiles could muster a tremendous amount of defensive and offensive magic, and felt he could hold his own if he had to.

An hour or so ago, Stiles had called his dad and explained the situation, and get an update on what happened to the hunter who dared to do these things to the werewolf. The Sheriff laughed as soon as he heard Stiles was stuck, and wasted several minutes calling up old memories of other situations in which Stiles ended up stuck to someone. He'd glued himself to Scott during school projects, but even as a paramedic he couldn't get away from the habit. 

During one particularly quite day, Stiles and Danny had been called to help a baker who had somehow become stuck in some baking equipment. When he'd reached into the batter to try to pull the man's hand free, he discovered that somehow an industrial epoxy had been mixed-in, the result of someone attempting to run the baker out of business for anti-competitive reasons, and Stiles and the man had to wait for a jackhammer and a series of smaller and sharper saws to cut them most of the way free. Stiles was not happy that this is what his father thought was most important to talk about right now.

Once the man had gotten the storytelling out of his system, he'd briefed Stiles on what he could about the case. It was then that Stiles learned much more about Derek's troubled life, and the history of competing hunter groups in the region. He learned that Derek had been deceived by the woman who had gone to extreme and highly illegal means of getting close to Derek, and then to his family, before going in on a plan with her father to destroy the entire werewolf line.

Stiles was furious about that, and caused a couple of the hospital monitoring machines to short-out as he though very dark thoughts about the people who did this to Derek.

He was shaken from his thoughts by a noise Derek made which started as a hitch in his breath, and then slipped into a pitiful whine. Stiles listened to it, trying to figure out if Derek was coming conscious, but it seemed like a nightmare. Derek took a stuttering intake again, twitched bodily, and stilled for a minute before the werewolf's body shifted to beta again and he emanated a tremendous, thunderous howl.

Stiles activated his spark and slammed a shield around them, muffling the sound entirely and blocking anyone from entering the room through the hallway door or even through the window. He panted at the effort; what Derek was giving off was not only audible sound, it was also a release of powerful magical energy.

Derek whimpered and seemed to pass-out again. In seconds, the silence of the room abated and when Derek returned to normal human form, Stiles took the shield down.

When the power was drawn back within himself, he experienced a series of flashes and memories of the life of a person he had never known. He realized immediately this was Derek's life, the things that had helped shape the other man. 

There were rushing moments in the library where Derek had discovered the joys of young adult books filled with magic and adventure.

There was family holidays, when Derek's family gathered together and he kept learning how many people there were that he knew. Each year seemed to have more.

In middle school there was soccer and basketball, which had matured into JV and then Varsity basketball during the first three years Derek was in school. He didn't make it to a fourth year, not graduating until a year late in New York, out with his sister hiding in the big apple's millions of convenient hidey-holes, unnoticed by hunters and pursued by nobody.

Stiles saw what the hunter had done, from the seduction and the many promises, filling a young man's eager mind with fantasies of the love of fairy tales, and to the day when he'd escaped the inferno that had taken everyone he knew from him. He didn't know how to reach his cousins who lived in other places, and didn't try for fear that the hunters would find them.

The spark saw his wolfman decide he was dangerous, that he could not be loved, and that he promised himself he was one of the people who just never met their soulmate and never would, and that he was better off without.

Stiles was crying, feeling all the memories as if they were his own, but interpreting them as he would. Remembering his own loss of his mother when he hadn't even reached ten years old, and feeling the effect of that magnified in Derek's perception of his own life.

"I didn't think I'd meet you."

Stiles had to pull himself from the raw input of emotion and visuals for a moment to realize someone in the room was talking. Derek was talking.

"You smell like everything wonderful in the world," the man said, following the words with a gentle squeeze of his wrist, and then a shifting of position to hold Stile's hand in his own.

"Yeah, well, I didn't expect to find you hanging in the most fucked-up situation I had ever seen, but your life seems like it's had a lot of moments like that."

Derek chuckled. He understood why Stiles was the way he was, learning about the man Stiles considered himself to be, and fought himself to be.

"I will try to avoid that in the future." Derek said, sighing.

"You be sure you do that, Derek."

"So, uhh, other than being 'that guy who smells amazing', what's your name?" Derek asked him, squeezing Stile's hand again.

Stiles relished in the closeness. He couldn't help the blush and didn't really care to. For all that Derek had gone through with manipulations and trickery and torture, he wanted to try to be as open as he could. "I'm Stiles. My given name is a mess, so let's just not even try. I'm the son of the Sheriff, and my dad informs me that Kate has been thoroughly put out of commission. Seems we have a hellhound for a deputy, and he kind of... took her way down south, if you catch my meaning, before coming back to the ordinary world. So don't you worry; your life is going to be a whole lot better from here on out."

"How can you be so sure?" Derek wasn't going to get past the distrust for a long time, but knew from the bonding that Stiles was worth trying for.

Stiles just shrugged. "It will be." And Derek seem satisfied with that answer, for now.


	6. Chapter 6

 "Stop! Stop here!" Erica nearly screamed with excitement, and Parrish dutifully pulled the cruiser over and waited for her to explain her moment of madness. She just stared and giggled, and the Deputy followed her line of sight, trying to identify what she was looking at.

"Erica, what are we doing here?"

"Do you see them? They're together! It's so cute!"

Erica doesn't ever use "cute" in a bubbly way, at least not in Jordan's presence. He's still trying to figure out what she means when he catches sight of two people in a booth at a decently nice restaurant in this part of town. They seem to have caught her attention. Actually, he would use cute, and her reaction to them does seem cute, though he doesn't quite get what she's reacting to.

"Who are they?"

"That's Stiles, the paramedic. He's my friend from school. And that's Derek. I'm not surprised you don't recognize him, since the torture job that hunter did made it hard to recognize him." Jordan did remember, and flashed back to that night, angry at the whole situation. Erica slapped him. "You flashed your eyes again. Knock it off."

"Sorry, the hellhound thing is still pretty new."

"You don't want to be the guy who outs the supernatural world to the mundanes, dude, so figure it out." Well, she's not being cute anymore. He'd gotten used to this over the months, and had gotten used to the mercurial expressiveness of his patrol partner.

"So, uhh, it's great that they're having dinner, but why is that important?"

"They're soulmates, man! Don't you pay attention? Somehow, Stiles had gotten stuck to Derek during the rescue, and then blah, blah, blah, they're sharing memories and enjoying the experience of being bondmates. It's pretty great, dude."

Parrish just shook his head. Months had passed since they last talked about this. In fact, it was the night they'd been called to the scene to rescue Derek from the hunter, and happened to take her down in a really nasty fight. That was also the night that he discovered he could bring people to hell, which was not the place he expected to ever go, but at least as a hellhound, it's not really so bad.

He looks at Stiles and Derek. He think she should congratulate them when he sees them around town. so he applies his professional training to memorize their faces, and other details that might help them stand-out in a crowd.

Erica slaps him on the leg. "Let's go, . You look like you're on a watch assignment."

"Nah, I just want to be sure I congratulate them if I see them around sometime."

"Jordan, you're a big romantic goof. Here we are, seeing them on their Valentine's Day date, and you want to shake their hands. It's cute, and weird, but mostly cute. You'll get your day, Deputy Hotpants."

He wants to protest some part of what she's said, but he figures it all out and finds he doesn't quite disagree. He just wants his own sometime, and until then, he'll just do his best.

He moves the car back into the lane and glances through the mirror as they pass. If these two guys can meet in such awful circumstances, with such difficult pasts, and then discover a great love with each other, that's gotta be worth waiting for.


End file.
